Dead Lucky (27 page)

Friday morning was garbage collection time, so Glen quickly called Michael Clay at the office and asked him to retrieve the paper from the bin under Glen's desk.

Clay rang back. “Sorry, Glen,” he said. “Your bin's empty.”

“Must be in the skip. Clay, please, could you . . . ?”

“You want me to look in the skip!”

“Please. It's important.”

So the luckless Clay went through the big metal bin out on the street, thinking he was looking for a needle in a haystack.

Ten minutes later he leaped out of the skip, rang Glen, and triumphantly announced, “Lincoln's memory is alive but with a few extra food stains!” Glen vowed to complete the walks in my memory.

SOUTH OF OUR HOME, the wilderness extends as far as the eye can see. It is a very different kind of wilderness from that of the Himalaya but with the same uplifting quality. Usually we welcome the solitude, but that morning Barbara had been pleased to have our closest friends gathered around, their presence making her feel less empty. But now, later in the day, she was able to be alone. With just our two big dogs for company, she followed the track toward the lookout. As soon as she was far enough away from the house, she began to talk to me.

“I don't know whether you can hear me, Lincoln,” she began, “but this wasn't how it was meant to be. We were going to grow old together, and we've got so much to live for, and so much to do here, and I just don't know if I can do it on my own.”

She was voicing some of the thoughts that had been troubling her during the night. Would she be able to keep our wonderful thirty-seven acres? Could she make the effort to do so in my memory? Or should she give up and move on? “I had hoped that eventually, when we were old enough to die, that I would go first so that I wouldn't have to deal with the loss of you.”

She had to tell me these things, even though her rational mind was telling her it was too late.

CLOAK OF DARKNESS

T
HE WHITENESS was so pervasive that I could not determine the time of day. It must be morning, I decided, because I had no memories of what had come before. Often I awake from a night's sleep disoriented after dreaming of being somewhere else. This time I was definitely somewhere else, but I did not know where. All I could tell was that my world consisted of mountains. Fresh snow covered the ground. Five hundred feet below my ridge-top vantage point the valley leveled out, indicating to me that I was a long way from the deep valleys and high peaks of the Himalaya. White mist limited my view to a few hundred yards, but what I could see fitted the characteristics of an exposed ridge in the Snowy Mountains of southeastern Australia, gentle ranges that are the domain of hikers and cross-country skiers, not mountaineers.

It did not occur to me that what I perceived as the valley floor might in fact be a layer of clouds sitting more than a mile above the Kangshung Glacier and stretching from Everest's Northeast Ridge all the way across to Makalu. Instead, I had firmly placed myself in the Snowy Mountains, where I felt with some degree of confidence that everything would work out fine for me. On the rolling hills around Mount Kosciuszko, I had taught myself to ski, and on the nearby slopes above Blue Lake, I had learned to climb the short, steep ice gullies between cliffs that offer good summertime rock climbing.

As soon as I thought about hikers and skiers, I became aware that other people were nearby. The precipice immediately in front of me was frighteningly steep, impossible for me to descend, but I could see people as dark shapes against the snow where the angle eased. Rows of rock walls lay across the slope. Some of these I interpreted as being the backs of low stone cottages—otherwise, where could the people that I saw take shelter? I could see them in groups, busy with small tasks and chatting to each other, but I could not hear a word. Although the nearest group was a hundred yards away, sometimes the face of a figure would come into focus. As soon as I attempted to put a name to the face, it dissolved into formless anonymity.

There was no shelter and nowhere to sit, so I brushed a small rock clean of its snow. I sat there, hunched up to stay warm, and watched the people below me. One of the faces, small and distant, recurred enough times for me to recognize it as belonging to Michael Dillon. Mike and I had spent a lot of time together as we traveled toward the mountain, sharing hotel rooms in Bangkok and Kathmandu and a string of lodges and dormitories across Tibet. At Base Camp, Mike's tent was immediately in front of mine. All of these points of intersection may have helped me see his face. I took heart from his alert eyes and broad smile. If I could locate Mike, I would be able to escape from the cold as well as the silence and the solitude. Mike would be able to show me around because it was his habit to get up early, head out with his camera, then appear at breakfast and tell me where he had been. He would know the lay of the land.

I watched the figures moving, a few of them walking by with some kind of purpose. I sensed that my sister Julia was here as well. I could not glimpse her face—she was farther away than that—but I had to find her and tell her that by tomorrow morning she must locate a hut where we could have a fire. Then I would go down to her and bring Mike with me, and the warmth of the fire would be so much better than sitting on rocks in the snow.

I decided to look around for firewood. There are trees in the Snowy Mountains—stunted, twisted snow gums with multiple trunks shading summer flowers—but I could not see a single one. I thought that the heavy snowfalls of the winter must have buried them in deep drifts. My ridge-top must have been above the treeline, but I kicked at shapes in the snow anyway, hoping to reveal some firewood in the form of fallen branches. All I found were more rocks. I sat down again and let myself doze off to sleep.

When I awoke, it was early the next morning. At least, I assumed it was morning because I found myself in the same place surrounded by the same eerie whiteness. Again I looked for somewhere different to sit, but nothing about the scene had changed, except that now I could see no people. But I sensed that Mike and Julia were still nearby. I sat on my cold rock and thought about Julia. I needed her presence because she is an organizer. She is a lawyer at work and a troubleshooter at home, juggling life with her partner and three sons under twelve. Our dad lives nearby. Our mother died of cancer a half dozen years ago, and now Julia holds us all together, always remembering birthdays and arranging family holidays—usually somewhere along the coast south of Sydney to make it more convenient for Michele, our elder sister, who lives even farther south. The cold reminded me that I had been unable to gather firewood. My failure in that respect led me to accept that I would not find Julia.

Time must have passed, but I did not sense its passage. The white other-worldliness had gone. The reality of my situation began to manifest as I felt the familiarity of darkness surrounding me, the first darkness I had experienced for what seemed like days. There were no stone cottages, no Julia, no Mike, no firewood, no hope of fire. I was alone. I could sense that people had been with me, but they had left on their own important journeys. I found myself in a small shelter sitting cross-legged on grass that had been laid on the dirt floor. It was the most basic of structures, a low hut with shaped timber uprights and a hastily thatched roof. Even though I was sitting down, there was very little headroom. Behind me was a wall of rough-hewn planks, but the sides were open so the occupant could keep watch in all directions. I was aware of these features despite the darkness. I took the shelter to be a goat-herder's shack in Nepal, and that made sense because I knew that the last words spoken to me had been in Nepali. It seemed that I was making some kind of progress because now I had a crude shelter and grass to sit upon, and yet I had no sense of where I was progressing from or to. I seemed to be endlessly watching and waiting.

I was aware of an expanse. There was only the slightest breeze, but the air was so cold that it chilled me. I could see many lights in different directions, just pinpricks indicating distant houses and settlements. Everything else was pitch-black. There must be a track or a road, I thought, that led to each of those houses. The tiny lights were welcoming but only for those who knew where they were going. When dawn came, I would hunt down the path to the nearest house. With that comforting plan in mind, I let myself drift back to sleep.

Suddenly—after I don't know how many hours—I awoke with a feeling of great fear. In one sense, nothing was different; I was still sitting cross-legged on a ridge-top high in the sky. Disoriented, I stretched out a gloved hand. I felt nothing. I removed the thick insulated gauntlet, and with my bare hand I scooped up a granular substance. It flowed through my fingers, but there were no tactile messages for my mind to decode. Then I realized that my fingers were frozen and that what I was handling was snow. I tried to feel my toes, but they were completely numb. Frostbite had struck, and the full force of the truth struck me at that moment: I was exhausted, frostbitten, and alone on the summit ridge of Everest. I had begun the decline, which would finish with me freezing to death.

The pinpricks of light that I had coveted were not distant houses welcoming me. They were the stars in the sky, and the only welcome they could offer me would be to heaven. Physically I was already there, surrounded by the cosmos, the highest person on the planet, and set to be the next Everest statistic. This was not how it was meant to end. This was definitely not how it was meant to end.

The horror of this realization snapped me into complete lucidity. I knew I had to escape from this awful predicament. My body was not in the best of shape, nor was my mind, but that was of no consequence. The vital point was that I take action, however bad my condition might be. I had to return alive to Barbara and the boys. This mattered to me more than anything else, more than my own death. If I let myself die, I would not notice my own passing, but the foursome of our family was too joyous and complete to be allowed to disintegrate into pain, despair, and endless thoughts of what might have been. I knew that death would be so easy for me now. All I would have to do was close my eyes and let myself slip away from the cold and the loneliness, as too many others had done these last weeks on this same deadly ridge. But for me, at that moment, death was not an option.

I was not in denial by repudiating death; I was not attempting to conjure up some outrageous idea of survival in the hope that it might happen. Hope had nothing to do with it. The odds were stacked against me, and the body count was proof. My only chance in such desperate straits was total belief. I had to live these next hours, next days—however long it took—with the certainty that I would survive.

In Sydney in April 2006, as I prepared to leave for Everest, I had renewed out loud to Barbara and the boys my commitment to coming home. I had repeated it silently to myself weeks later when I stood beneath Everest, wondering what it would demand of me.

And now I knew. Everest wanted everything I had, every last scrap of commitment, of determination, of belief. The focus of my life from this point onward was to be with Barbara, Dylan, and Dorje again. Some might say I was deluded, shrugging away the guilt of shattering our family while fooling myself I could do the impossible. But I had learned many years back that the impossible was not always so. I had been on other mountains when events went so horribly wrong that the question was not whether I would die but when. Each of those times, despite the odds, I came through alive. There may have been some luck involved, but luck is of no use unless you have a never-give-up attitude.

The only way for me to survive the remainder of the night was to maintain two things—my core temperature and my wakefulness. I needed strategies for each. My pack would provide valuable insulation from the snow, and inside it were my down mitts. In its top pocket were heat pads, which could provide up to twelve hours of warmth, produced by chemical reactions. In the darkness I felt for my pack, but it was nowhere to be found. My oxygen set would have helped my frostbite and my mind, but it was long gone as well. There was no sign of a mask or a regulator or a cylinder. The pack and the oxygen may have been a few feet away, but I did not know where the edge of the precipice was. The darkness was total.

My only option now was to conserve the heat my body produced. I continued to sit cross-legged, my arms folded across my chest, my hands crossed not far below my neck, my head tilted forward. This position was the best for keeping my vital organs warm. I wriggled my numb fingers constantly. I could tell they were moving, but the tips felt wooden, totally without sensation.

On other unplanned bivouacs, when it had been either impossible or unwise to sleep, I had spent the night singing. But here I had no breath to spare, and my mind was empty of songs. I felt that even humming would eat up some of the energy I needed to conserve. Deprived of oxygen, my mind had already played tricks with me and was likely to do so again.

Staying awake would be my biggest challenge. I would have to focus on something concrete, and the obvious choice was my body. I maintained my cross-legged position and swayed rhythmically from side to side. The movement kept my blood pumping through me. Soon I found that the variation of rotating my upper body felt better, clockwise then counterclockwise. With my shoulders, I traced small erratic circles, as though stirring my upper body with my spine. There was no need for precision behind the actions—they were just something for my mind to hold on to. I repeated the sequence again and again.

During years of serious meditation, I had experienced different levels of consciousness, but here on the mountaintop I did not want to go any deeper. I did not even want to think about where those other levels might take me. Instead, I clung to the grossest form of mind control, the only one I could manage in my weakened, oxygen-starved state. I set my mind to watch, feel, and steer my movements, and as time ticked by, they became as familiar as well-practiced tennis swings—backhand, forehand, backhand again.